


Mistress of War

by Naraht



Category: NASA RPF, Original Work
Genre: Cold War, F/M, NASA, Prostitution, Spies & Secret Agents
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-30
Updated: 2020-04-30
Packaged: 2021-03-01 21:08:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 948
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23933581
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Naraht/pseuds/Naraht
Summary: "Come, you masters of war..."
Kudos: 7





	Mistress of War

**Author's Note:**

> Apparently this is what happens when you listen to Bob Dylan's "Masters of War" while reading Mike Gray's _Angle of Attack: Harrison Storms And the Race For the Moon_. The primary subject is, of course, [the Apollo 1 fire](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_1).
> 
> Resemblance to some persons living and dead is not entirely coincidental, but the main character and all her activities are entirely fictional.
> 
> This story was written in 2007 or so. I've just unearthed it now and touched it up a little.

It's 1966. Los Angeles a go-go. A boom town even without Dick Nixon in the driver's seat anymore. Not just palm trees and sand, not just the lure of the silver screen. Here is where they make myths, craft the legends of a nation out of steel and circuitry. This is industry, Eisenhower's military/industrial complex cast in glass and acoustical tile, heaping up the fruits of the Cold War so quickly that it barely has time to count. This is the space age; doesn't she know it.

A few years ago, back when she was a freelancer in Florida, she did five out of America's seven clean-cut, square-jawed heroes. _Gratis_. Call it patriotism.

It's a great time to be a working girl.

Living on the edge of this world, she spends her days in a bungalow on a quiet cul-de-sac. It is only a few miles from the test stands and the boxy concrete of the company offices. Her heavy drapes are always pulled against the pitiless California sun. By night she's out at the parties. A secretary, she says coyly, sipping at a cocktail that never quite empties. That they pretend to believe her is just part of the game.

Corporate hospitality, that's what they call it. Welcome the men who build the bombs and missiles, and even more the men who buy them. Get them wanting more, always more, and leave them knowing you're the only one who can give it to them. That's what the managers do, and their job is the harder one.

Keep the clients happy. Give them drinks, dinner, a beautiful girl on the arm and maybe they'll forgive the flaws, the ragged edges, the crack in the facade that runs right to the heart. Maybe they'll stop pushing. Maybe just for the night.

More than once she has the client himself, the one they're all afraid of, the one for whom all this was built. He talks about the _flight article_ , gazing past her, as if it's his errant child. She thinks he would have been charming if only he could have brought himself to try.

Like all of them, he drinks hard. The moon is a lonely business. That's what they tell her, still breathing the fumes of glory. Wrung-out, grey-faced, unfocused, still dreaming. Through their thick glasses they can hardly see her. They'll fuck the very idea of a woman. She nods and listens, waits, eases sheaves of papers out of hands numbed by the glassy touch of the whisky bottle. The exchange is painless. Just another business transaction.

Men will say things in front of a working girl that they'll never say in front of their wives or even their friends. Problems with the capsule – she knows more about them than NASA does. What she knows about its makers could fill a thick binder. Somewhere behind the iron curtain it does, back in a cool crisp air that she'll probably never again breathe in her lifetime. Only if the winds change.

If he had the chance, another man tells her, he'd kill a Commie with his bare hands. He'd butcher them like they butchered his best friend. He was in Korea, up at Choisin, during that bitterly cold winter where flesh froze like steel. Lying in bed, he examines his strong, square fingertips like he expects something to be left behind. But he doesn't think about that now, he says.

All choppy disconnected phrases, all boasts that come to nothing in the end. He talks about Kennedy's blockade, sun shining down as the boats rode the swells closer to destruction. Or was that the Bay of Pigs? It doesn't matter. He is a tale-teller, the best there is. And she does believe that he was at Choisin. The scars are too deep for that to be a lie. He sounds like her uncle who was at Stalingrad. In a way they are kindred spirits.

The fire comes in January, when 1967 has hardly been given a chance yet. Most of a continent away and it still burns her. The commander was a spiteful, unpleasant man when he was alive, but now he's dead, and two others with him. Maybe in Baikonur they're celebrating. Maybe in Moscow. She doesn't know. She can't manage it.

Like a crucible, the fire changes men. Gentle and courtly souls choke out words like 'bitch' and 'whore' as if their throats have filled with ash, fuck as if they could inscribe their own pain inside her. Grown, responsible, brilliant men shake with sobs like little children. All she can do is hold them until their grief runs dry again and they collect themselves to face the world once more.

It is not what she wants. Death isn't what she wants, not for anyone. During the blockade she was down in Miami, meeting someone who knew someone. A white woman out of place amid the noise and smells of Little Havana. Every radio on the street was tuned to familiar voices, and everyone was afraid. She walked out of the heat of the day into a small, bare church where the icons were strange. A staunch atheist, she sank to her knees and prayed for the world to come to its senses.

All she wants is life, a better life for all peoples, even the men who make the missiles and the bombs. Maybe it can only happen on the moon.

If the baby belongs to any of these men, she will never know for certain. In the end it doesn't matter. It is enough to know that she has finally created something, in a world where it is far too easy to destroy.


End file.
